HERALD

When we pronounce the word science many things come to our minds: the theories and the experiments, the laboratories and places of research, the scientific communities and congresses, the journals and the manuals, the academies and scientific societies, the institutions and the languages of science.

Sometimes, when we speak of science in reference to Bacon or Mersenne or Galilei we are drawn to forget that that which we call science (in the form in which we know it) did not exist in the first half of the seventeenth century. The two great historic processes which gave life to our science, and which the sociologists have called institutionalization and professionalization of science, took place between the middle of the seventeenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries. The question that the historians of philosophical and scientific thought ask themselves (must ask themselves) is the following: what idea or what image of science made those processes possible? On what terrain were they born?